Father Labby had long ago stopped introducing himself as Randy, though the name still lived somewhere inside him like a church he could enter when the world grew too loud. Life on the ranch suited him, the slow mornings, the honest work, the way the land itself seemed to breathe with him. He often thought that the ranch was the last place where the world still told the truth. “There are two aspects in everything,” he would murmur to the horses, as if they needed reminding. “One advantage, one disadvantage. Stay in the middle, in equilibrium, and you stay close to God.” The animals didn’t answer, but they listened better than most people. He had been thinking a great deal about the dual mind lately on how everything in nature balanced itself, how beauty was simply the visible form of balance. Even the body came in pairs: two eyes, two hands, two lungs, two hemispheres of the brain. Creation itself seemed to insist on symmetry. And yet the human world had drifted so far from it.

One night he dreamed. That kind of dream that doesn’t fade in the morning but clings to the ribs like chicory smoke. In the dream he understood with incredible clarity that what people called “life on earth” was only the devil’s dream, a shimmering deception built from comfort, pleasure, and the obsessive glow of progress. Everything addictive, everything easy, everything that numbed the soul, all of it part of the same spell. To see clearly, he realized, one had to look at the physical world in reverse, as if the truth were printed backward on the inside of things.

He woke with a polarizing metallic taste in his mouth and the certainty that the soul was reading the world while the mind only skimmed it. “I am interpreting for the body,” he whispered. “The transcendental already knows who it is.”

In the days that followed, he noticed how people moved through life with a kind of passive dread, avoiding action not because they lacked desire but because they feared suffering. The subconscious remembered the pendulum, every joy swinging back into pain, every rise followed by a fall. A community built on fear becomes a community without agency. Father Labby knew this. He had lived it. The only way through was to ride the flow while it was positive and rise above the mainstream frequency when the pendulum swung back.

One morning, while scrolling through his phone, he felt a sudden wave of nausea. “Are we free?” he asked aloud. “Yes, free to scroll.” The revelation struck him with the force of a confession. Humanity lived inside a digital prison, mistaking the glow of screens for liberating light. People had become mute, reduced to text, text that was monitored, indexed, and fed back to them as identity. They were no longer human beings but economic abstractions. Exiled in their own lives.

He stepped outside to breathe. The wind carried a whisper: Be one with the Tao and everything becomes possible. He didn’t know if it came from memory or from something older.

Later that week, a friend sent him a podcast, a chaotic conversation between a podcaster and a former comedian. Father Labby listened to it while repairing a fence. The talk jumped from politics to gender debates to culture wars to personal wounds. Beneath the noise, he heard the same thing he heard in confession: people clinging to rigid thinking because they feared the fluidity of the universe. They mistook their ego for identity, their opinions for truth. They forgot that sex was biological, gender psychological, and the soul neither. They forgot that no one was a cosmic mistake.

The comedian spoke about retreating to rural life, raising animals, escaping the rat race, like he, himself did, yet even in the comedian's escape he carried the posture of a revolutionary, fighting systems, concepts, instead of letting them dissolve. Father Labby recognized the stage. The ego dissolves, but it does not go quietly. It claws at the walls on its way out.

Symbols came up in his mind - how a logo becomes a spell when charged with intention, how the swastika once meant life before it was inverted into a wound on history. Corporations had become governments. Money had become the new deity. People ran from distraction to distraction, avoiding the inner voice that already knew the truth. Music, too, was a spell, what you listened to revealed who you were in that moment. He remembered the day he listened to Metallica after five days of Reiki purification and felt physically ill, as if the collective shadow of the music pressed against his chest. He turned it off and played Brian Scott instead, letting the frequencies reassemble him.

Dreams came in waves. In one, the soul was incarcerated, tormented, unable to express itself under the weight of material pressure. In another, he wandered through overlapping parallel worlds, bumping into people who still had bodies while others were nearly transparent. He saw Velchov, the quiet occultist, his face barely visible, almost out of the body. He saw Andrei, the technologist, asking strange questions from a lower plane. He saw rooms shifting endlessly, as if spiritual development had expression in architecture.

He dreamed of wild hogs with brown hair, of a ghost pressing on his chest until he couldn’t breathe, of a door marked with the number 1 and a collapsing financial system. He dreamed of “hot immundas,” a message at the threshold of sleep - purification by fire. Images of people oscillating between demonic and divine, stabilizing only through purification.

And then, one morning, he woke up to a single word: Servus! An exclamation, a greeting from the soul. I know you! I recognize you! I know your shortcomings. Do not worry. I know your path. As it started to be revealed to him, he wrote it down before the day could steal it.

The ranch became his monastery. The animals, his parish. The wind, his scripture. He remembered the vision of the woman with black, curly hair, the guide who appeared at the edge of the field, reminding him of Greti, reminding him of something he had forgotten before he was born. The soul, he knew, was shy. It flourished only in gentleness. Harsh environments made it retreat, unexpressed, unrecognized. He saw this in people who mocked the church, who carried anger like armor. They weren’t rejecting God. They were terrified of looking inside and finding something fragile and divine.

He thought often of the modern world, how people had been lowered into material obsession, how ancient texts had lost their power because humanity had lost the capacity to read them. Everyone lived a prescribed life, moving from one mental addiction to another. He remembered a dream of eating pork raised by family, and the subconscious whispering - “This is not the truth.” The truth was never in the object but in the awareness behind it.

He had tasted freedom once, real freedom, the kind that dissolves the world, and then returned to the “normal” state of modern man. Now he searched for ways to make that freedom permanent, not as a button to press but as a state to inhabit. He realized he had been searching for years without knowing it.

One evening, as the sun dipped low, Father Labby stood in the field in the middle of the sunflowers field and felt the world split gently into two layers - the visible and the true. He stood exactly in the seam between them. Balanced. Awake. Listening.

Randy had walked into the world. Father Labby walked between them.